Recently by Michael Banks

Shamin Kharrazi talks about plans for the Iranian Light Source Facility

By Michael Banks

You may remember a few weeks ago when I wrote about Turkey’s plans to build a 3 GeV synchrotron in Ankara. In fact the next decade will see two other new synchrotrons springing up in the Middle East.

One – SESAME – is near Amman, Jordan, and I visited the facility earlier this week to hear how progress is moving towards completion by 2015 (see this story for more details).

Synchrotrons accelerate electrons to high energy and then make the particles generate flashes of X-rays as they travel around a circular ring. The X-rays are then sent down beamlines where they are used in a range of experiments from condensed-matter physics to biology.

However, a talk given by Shamin Kharrazi at the SESAME users’ meeting also outlined plans Iran has to build its very own synchrotron – the Iranian Light Source Facility (ILSF) – by 2020.

A conceptual design review for the 100 m diameter facility has just been completed and it is estimated that construction will begin by 2015.

Plans for the ILSF, like its Turkish equivalent, are still firmly on the drawing board, but researchers in Iran are hoping the facility will get funding. Kharrazi remarked that around seven years ago synchrotron radiation was not widely known to the authorities in Iran. Now, in a matter of only a few years, the country has plans for its own facility.

Indeed, over the past few years Iran has been building a community of those who could use their own national facility as well as SESAME. At times this has been painstaking and even involved researchers searching via Google for others around Iran who work with X-rays.

Kharrazi reassured SESAME users that Iran will still play an integral part in that project. “We think that by 2020 there will be enough demand for Iran to have its own synchrotron and also use SESAME,” says Kharrazi. “Just like France has the Soleil synchrotron as well as the ESRF.”

By Michael Banks

In a video interview with Physics World in June, Michael Schreiber, editor-in-chief of the journal EPL, marked the 25th anniversary of the publication by hoping that it would, one day, receive a submission from the International Space Station (ISS) (see video above).

We thought he was joking, but that day has now come. On 27 October Russian astronaut Sergey Aleksandrovich Volkov, who is currently aboard the ISS, submitted a paper via e-mail to EPL, which is jointly published by the Institute of Physics and the European Physical Society.

The paper was about measuring the speed of sound in a plasma under microgravity conditions. In an EPL editorial, Schreiber wrote that the journal has now left the confines of the globe “by publishing what is, I believe, the first manuscript ever submitted from beyond the globe, namely from the International Space Station”.

That all important caveat (“I believe”) proved its worth as it transpires that a paper was already submitted from the ISS in 2004 to the journal Radiology – published by the Radiological Society of North America.

Still, the EPL paper is perhaps the first physics-related article to be submitted from space. But Schreiber has even loftier ambitions: hoping for a paper from a space-trip to Mars to coincide with EPL’s golden jubilee in 2036.

Institute of Accelerator Technologies, Ankara University
(Credit: Michael Banks)

By Michael Banks

If my recent travel (see here and here) to Ankara, Turkey, left you wanting to see more images from the trip, then fear no more.

On the Physics World Flickr page, you can now peruse selected images from the visit to the Institute of Accelerator Technologies at Ankara University, as well as the Proton Accelerator facility operated by the Turkish Atomic Energy Authority.

Look out for further coverage from my trip to Turkey in future issues of Physics World.

By Michael Banks

Blink and it’s gone.

No, it’s not the latest in the search for the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, but instead a slight difference in the mass between neutrinos and their antimatter counterparts, antineutrinos.

Neutrinos come in three “flavours” – electron, muon and tau – that change or “oscillate” from one to another as they travel though space.

It is generally thought that neutrinos and antineutrinos should have the same mass. Last year, however, results from the MINOS experiment at Fermilab, near Chicago, showed a 40% difference between muon neutrinos and muon antineutrinos (converting into tau neutrinos and tau antineutrinos, respectively) as they travelled from the accelerator to the MINOS detector (shown above) some 735 km away in the Soudan mine, Minnesota.

The results were presented with a “confidence level” of around 90–95%, which in statistical terms is approximately “two sigma” (usually a “discovery” requires five sigma).

Although the two sigma significance was small, the result was backed up three days later by a three sigma effect at another detector in the Soudan Mine – MiniBooNe. They saw a difference when muon neutrinos oscillate into electron neutrinos compared with the related process for muon antineutrinos.

Physicists noted that if the result turned out to be true it would not come as a surprise, but as an “overwhelming shock”.

But now it seems as though those fears have at least been partially allayed. After gathering twice as much data, researchers at MINOS announced yesterday at the Lepton Photon 2011 meeting in Mumbai, India, that they found the difference had dropped from 40% to 16%.

So it seems that there is still a disparity, but more data will be needed before we can be sure whether there is any mass difference between neutrinos and antineutrinos.

By Michael Banks

Unobtanium, collossium and fibonaccium. Those were just some of your suggestions for the name of element 112 following its confirmation two years ago.

In the end researchers, led by Sigurd Hofmann and his group at the Centre for Heavy Ion Research (GSI) in Darmstadt, Germany, went for copernicium, which was finally approved by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) in July 2009.

Now we want your suggestions for two new elements – 114 and 116 – after they were added to the periodic table following a three-year review by the IUPAC, which develops standards for naming new elements and compounds.

Currently element 114 is known as ununquadium with element 116 named ununhexium.

The elements were spotted by researchers at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna, Russia, back in 2004, but only confirmed last year by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and the GSI lab.

Researchers at the JINR will now get the chance to name the new elements. They will submit their suggestions to the IUPAC who will then publish them on its website for six months giving scientists and the public time to scrutinize and comment on the new name.

So physicsworld.com readers what are your suggestions?

Martin Rees picks up the Templeton Prize from Prince Philip
(Courtesy: Clifford Shirley)

By Michael Banks

Can you guess what these two are saying to each other?

The photo, which was taken yesterday, shows the cosmologist Martin Rees from Cambridge University picking up the 2011 Templeton Prize at a ceremony at Buckingham Palace.

Rees was presented with the gong, which comes with a cheque for a whopping £1m, by Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, in a private ceremony that was also attended by seven former Templeton winners, including Paul Davis and George Ellis.

Yesterday also happened to be Prince Philip’s 90th birthday.

According to the Templeton Foundation, the prize is awarded for “progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities”.

The 68-year-old cosmologist was awarded it for his “profound insights” into the nature of the cosmos that have “provoked vital questions that address mankind’s deepest hopes and fears”.

There was some controversy around Rees being awarded the prize. Indeed, he told me he was “surprised” on hearing he had won and that he usually tries to avoid discussing science and religion with his views being “rather boring”.

There is not a £1m prize on offer from us, but physicsworld.com readers – can you guess what is being said between Rees (right) and Prince Philip in our caption competition?

If we have some funny submissions then we may be able to dig out a prize for the best one.

By Michael Banks

If my memory serves me right, my first introduction to physics came via a demonstration of the Van der Graaf generator.

Situated in the middle of the classroom one day stood a scary-looking contraption consisting of an upright metal stand with a large silver ball on top.

However, once our teacher stood up to give the hair-raising demonstration of the device, the fear of it being used as some kind of torture tool soon eroded.

While Van der Graaf generators are still widely used to teach students about static electricity, researchers at Case Western Reserve University in the US have now used a similar contraption – a Tesla coil – for an altogether different reason.

They have formed the Tesla Orchestra, which uses Tesla coils to convert music into lightning and sound.

In their set-up, an alternating current (AC) is used to generate each bolt of lightning produced by the Tesla coil. As it is made by AC, the bolt has a certain frequency, which can then be tuned to reproduce all of the notes on a keyboard.

Last month the group invited musicians to submit music so they could convert the tunes into sparks and the accompanying sounds. You can see the results in the video above.

On 11 June the Tesla Orchestra will select some of the best songs and perform them in a live show in the Masonic Auditorium in Cleveland.

If you are in the area that day don’t miss out on what is sure to be an electrifying show!

By Michael Banks

Well it had to come didn’t it? There have been quite a few science raps over the last few years touching on nuclear physics, the American astronomer Edwin Hubble and even the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN particle-physics lab, so it seems about right there is now one about climate change.

The rap video for I’m a climate scientist was produced by the Australian current affairs television programme Hungry Beast.

Featuring lines such as “climate change is caused by people, Earth unlike Alien has no sequel”, the video features a raft of climate scientists doing their best Beastie Boys impression.

I will let you decide whether using rap as a means of communicating climate science is a worthwhile endeavour.

By Michael Banks

If you are in the US and stuck for things to do this weekend, then you might well think about catching the noir film The Big Bang, which is released today.

Starring Antonio Banderas, who plays private detective Ned Cruz, and directed by Tony Krantz, the film features Cruz searching for a missing stripper named Lexie Permisson (played by Sienna Guillory) while contending with unsavoury Russian boxers and brash police detectives.

And the physics connection? Well apart from a café in the film called Planck’s Constant Café, the movie’s resident madman is Sam Elliott, played by Simon Kestral, who, with the help of a particle physicist, has built a proton collider under the New Mexico desert to search for the Higgs boson. The film then sees Cruz heading to the underground “military base” to find Permisson.

From the trailer the physics in the movie seems to be fairly accurate. “In 27 hours I am going to find something that theoretically should exist but no-one has ever seen,” says Kestral. “Funny,” replies Cruz. “That is exactly what I am looking for.”

Before heading off to the nearest cinema, however, you might want to read this less than favourable review of the film in the New York Times, which calls the movie a “jumble of notions tossed into a hat”, with the picture being a “low point for Mr Banderas”.

Well, at least it contains some accurate physics, which probably makes for a change.

N.B. The film is rated R (“under 17, requires accompanying parent or adult guardian”) so take note when watching the above trailer.

By Edwin Cartlidge, Rome, Italy

Rome, the birthplace of nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi, is this week hosting a conference dedicated to discussing results from the NASA satellite that bears his name. Some 400 scientists have gathered in the Italian capital to discuss what the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope, launched in June 2008, can tell us about all manner of extreme celestial events – from the accretion of matter by supermassive black holes and ultra-energetic events known as gamma-ray bursts to the hypothesized collision of dark-matter particles.

First up on to the vast stage of the echoey Aula Magna at La Sapienza University was NASA’s Elizabeth Hays, who gave an overview of Fermi’s progress to date. Hays says she was happy to report that Fermi’s operations were “becoming almost mundane”, now that the satellite has been circling the Earth for over 1000 days, completing more than 16,000 orbits in that time, and collecting vast quantities of gamma-ray data in the process. (There is even now a Fermi app for the iPhone/iPad.)

Some of the gamma rays collected by Fermi have their origins on Earth, with Hays pointing out that radiation generated by charged particles during thunderstorms created something of a minor storm of their own on the Web with nearly half a million views of a NASA video explaining the process (see video above). Fermi’s principal source of gamma radiation is, however, outer space, and it surveys almost the whole sky in three hours, making increasingly detailed studies of bright sources and attempting to pinpoint the nature of weaker ones.

The first catalogue of distinct gamma-ray sources revealed by Fermi was released about a year ago and researchers have been working furiously to get a second, more precise catalogue published. As Dave Thompson of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center explained, this has taken a lot longer to produce than expected but he argues that when it comes out later on this month it will represent a “major revision” of the old catalogue, listing some 1888 active galactic nuclei and other gamma-ray sources.

Many of those who have made the trip to Rome will also be hoping that another high-profile – and very expensive – astroparticle mission will finally get to make the trip into space in the next few days or weeks. That mission is the cosmic-ray observatory known as the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, which is expected to launch on 16 May on the space shuttle Endeavour. As speaker Giovanni Bignami of the University of Pavia put it, “we are keeping our fingers crossed”.

Edwin Cartlidge is a science writer based in Rome